After being jam-packed with a dozen astronauts last week, the International Space Station will look mighty empty with only a two-man skeleton crew holding down the orbiting outpost for most of December.

Iomega’s original ScreenPlay Pro network media player was a bit of a mixed bag. It had very good connectivity features, including a video input option that allowed it to capture video as well as simply playing audio and video files that were already stored on it. However, it was let down by its inability to play H.264 video – the format used by the ubiquitous iPod and numerous other devices.

Stephen Fry has quit Plaxo after he became annoyed that the social networking site was revealing what he sees as too many personal details with anyone visiting the site - as opposed to designated contacts.

Fashions come and go, in IT as well as ‘real life’, and those charged with managing desktops and laptops have been bombarded over much of the last year with information concerning ‘virtual desktop solutions’.

Think Apple's Magic Mouse - reviewed here - is the acme of input devices? You may have to think again. UK tech company Cambridge Consultants has announced what it claims is "a whole new way of interacting with computers" - a squeezable controller.

Home Office estimates for the eventual size of the vetting database look like becoming one of the most inelastic – and therefore least accurate – forecasts in the history of this government’s planning process.

Plenty of notebooks supporting Windows 7 multi-touch features have already been announced, but the Aspire 5738PG Touch is one of the earliest to actually hit the shelves. Acer has entered into the spirit of the touch revolution by implementing the technology on-screen as well as on the trackpad, but more on that later.

The Government could abolish the edited electoral roll which organisations can buy from local authorities and use for any purpose. It is consulting on the issue after a review of Government data handling recommended that it be scrapped.

The DARPA Network Challenge - a race to find ten large red balloons to be flown at undisclosed locations in the USA this Saturday - is beginning to take shape, with competing teams trying to marshal the legions of crowdsourced operatives necessary for a win. Meanwhile rules and details have been modified in an attempt to prevent some of the more obvious stratagems.

Technology marketing people are notorious for confusing the hell out of us by trying to dress up relatively simple concepts and developments to make them appear more significant than they are. If they’re not doing this, they’re going to the other extreme and trying to sell us magic bullets that will make complex problems go away with a single shot.

Miscreants have developed a ransomware package that blocks internet access in a bid to force infected users into paying up by sending a text message to a premium rate SMS number, lining the pocket of cybercrooks in the process.

With Red Hat, Novell - and now Intel, thanks to its $884m acquisition of Wind River - all crowding into the real-time Linux space, Concurrent has to keep on its toes and keep its RedHawk Linux, well, current.

OK, sure: liquid can hold and transfer way, way more heat than air – we all know that. But is dropping an entire rack of servers into what looks like an enormous deep fryer the right solution? The answer from the folks at Green Revolution Cooling is a resounding, “Yes!”

Large shared-memory computing seems to be making a bit of a comeback. The two players we have already talked about ScaleMP and 3Leaf, use primarily off-the-shelf servers (with a special ASIC, in 3Leaf’s case) along with Infiniband connections and specialized software to build cache-coherent, shared-everything systems.

The annual Supercomputing show is refreshing in that it pulls exhibitors of all stripes, ranging from colleges and research labs to the usual slate of large system, software, and infrastructure vendors.